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I set up my chair. Outside, so I can smoke. I've got my jacket on. My hard drive is plugged in. Start the music.
I've got less than an hour of battery left to write this. Work to do.
He' an old man. One of the oldest in Burundi, I think. I've spent months talking to him, gaining his trust. It's not one sided either, I trust him. He's my house-boy, my guard, the one who watches over me and my compound while I sleep. I feel like I'm exploiting him by doing this, and to a degree I am, but it's essential. Necessary. This is something that I must do, that's forced by this moment and the necessity of my position in this society. I have to ask him about these things, I have to represent him favorably despite my own opinions of the subject.
Manu Chao rocks me sleepily in my chair. I pull up a seat for him. He's wearing an old army jacket, winter issue. The fake fur around the neck dwarfs his already small frame. He's wearing an old hat from some unheard of American corporation that he probably got at the market for pennies. He's nervous. I give him a Primus, the local beer. We both like them, and it's a gesture of friendship from the muzungu, the American that's presently going to grill him about everything.
I don't speak his language, Kirundi. He doesn't speak English. We communicate through a mix of the two languages learned through conversation, TV, and radio plus a large contribution of hand-gestures and charades. We both like charades; we're both clowns and entertainers at heart, despite the fifty year difference in age and drastic inequality in wealth and position. It's an effective way to communicate, and despite the lack of depth, truth has a strange way of making itself to the surface. When you can't rely on subtleties, the careful presumptions that protect you in everyday life fade away quickly. I broach the subject carefully, asking him about the war.
"Icenda nitatu," he says to me. 1993. "Presidenti Dadaye." He's taking me back in time to 1993. I know from previous conversations that he lived in Uganda from 1975 to 1992. Now, it's 1993. He's back in Burundi. President Dadaye is a Hutu, and he's the president of the country. He's making an effort to bring democracy to the country with the help of the Swiss and Americans. I don't know how truthful this claim is. I don't tell him. Instead, I gesture for him to continue, rotating to fingers around each other and say the word for 'then'.
"Presidenti Dadaye. Umuhutu. Je we, umuhutu." He's an ethnic kinsman of the old president. His Kirundi is short, even I can tell that. Over the months, we've developed a symbiotic language, one that we can both understand. I only know a few hundred words of Kirundi, and he only a few dozen of English. But we understand. He's a Hutu, and by making the statement, and looking intently with his eyes locked on mine and his fists clinched close to his chest, he signals that he liked the president. Many did. From the Rural towns in the South, along the cost of lake Tanganyika to the West and the major Hutu cities of Bururi and Bujumbura, many people liked the president.
"Umututsi 'BAH!' president Dadaye. Mirongicenda nakatatu. Fini." The Tutsis, 'BAH!', he makes a gesture with two hands holding a rifle, emulating firing, president Dadaye. Mirongicenda nakatatu. 1993. Finished. The end. He spreads his arms out, christ-like, and closes his eyes, his mouth agape. There's a finality in his gesture, a lack of hope. He's reluctant to say more, I know. He doesn't like that I'm typing. He doesn't like it at all, yet he's curious. He drinks more of his Primus. He shakes his head negatively when when I read to him what I've written. It's sad to him.
"Abatutsi baramurashi Presidenti Dadaye," he says. They shot him. They killed him. The Tutsi minority set into power by the colonial Belgians killed the Hutu leader striving to develop a democracy in the struggling country. The Hutu where outraged. I can see it on his face, his old tired face. His eyes squint, his big black lips purse in anger and contempt as he explains and acts out the events to me. He glares at the screen of my computer, points a finger. He wants to know what I'm writing. I tell him as best as I can, but he can't know all of it, even if I knew all of the words. At this point, we are both characters. I can't let either one of us know what's going to be written. I can't tell him that I'm recording this in his favor, including his bias, lest he become too fervent. This isn't an exposition.
"Abahutu baca baratemagura abatutsi." The Hutus buy machetes and begin a genocidal crusade against their ethnic superiors. He tells me so. He's not afraid of that, no guilt in his demeanor. They chop them up he says. "Gukata". To cut. The Iterambere. The Hutu national party, the rebels. The Hutu resistance party. And who's to say that they were wrong? A political terrorist assassinates the president of your country and the uneducated, the underprivileged rise up violently against the correctly perceived aggressors? He's proud to talk of his country this way. It's a small "fuck you" against the colonial powers that destroyed his way of life.
He coughs. He doesn't know what to say next. I need to comfort him, to console him, to provide him with encouragement so that I can get the next bit from him. I need to to tell him that I don't condemn his actions or the actions of his people. I do so. I act it out. A charade. I indicate that I'm the Tutsi, strutting proudly through the streets kicking the Hutus out of my way with a condescending kick of my boot and spit. He applauds, a smile on his face, recognizing what I'm doing. The lines around his eyes indicate security.
"Ndakunda abahutu," I tell him. I like the Hutus. I like your people. He replicates the charade, mocking the people that were his bane for a quarter century, arrogant with power afforded to them from a colonial European country, a power they didn't deserve.
"Ego, ego." He agrees.
I ask him if he participated in the war. In the genocide. I don't know the word for that, in French or Kirundi. I wouldn't say it if I did. I simply asked him if he cut. If he cut the Tutsis.
"Oya," he says. Vehemently, oya. No. No, I could never buy a machete and chop somebody up with it. I hid in my house, and listened to all the people go crazy. Umusazi. Crazy. They were crazy. They were killing, and I was in my house. That's what he tells me, slashing with both hands to show me what they were doing. He was in his house in Mushasha, that he was sleeping, putting both hands together and leaning his head on them, a gesture for resting, for escaping.
I can't put this in Kirundi, I can't type what he said to me. I don't know enough, my vocabulary isn't enough. But I believe him, even as he sits, crossing his legs and picking at his ear. He's nervous, I can see that. He doesn't like to talk about this. That's understandable. Nobody here likes to talk about this. I light another cigarette. It's a dark time in their history, a time when brothers murdered their brother-in-laws because they looked different, because a colonial system pervaded their morality and encouraged them to believe that they were of a different stock. There's tension between the two of us, between me and my elder friend.
"Ndakunda Primus," I say, to lighten the mood. I like Priums. I like beer. He echoes me, and seems to be enjoying the music. He laughs as he says it, and laughs more when I try to explain to him what I've written. There's no way I could tell him what I've written. I'm exploiting him, exploiting his story. And what do I know about it now? We find humor in it, as I try to explain my writing. The kind of humor that is only present in the face of tension. I can't help but ask myself if my guard, the guy who protects my house, my car, my possessions, did he participate in this genocide? He trusts me, that's why he's told me this. And so I must trust him. But he only trusts me so much as I can pay him. So how much do I trust him? Our beers are almost finished. It's late. I finish the interview.
As we clink our beers together with the Kirundi cheers, I say "Ijoro ryiza." Good night. He slinks off towards his room, the faded green of his jacket highlighted by the fluorescent bulbs of my porch. I don't know what to think. Did he participate? Should I care? I don't know. If he did - if he did cut people up, if he did lie to me, what should I do? He's my house-boy now. My guard. And he's a good man, and a good Hutu. Do I trust his story despite how nervous he was? I don't know. But I think that's probably the most hopeful thing in this country. People forget. People can ignore. He's forgetting his own past, or at least trying to ignore it. I know he was here during that time, and I know it was hard to be passive. I know he's proudly Hutu. Today though, he works happily alongside many Tutsis, Americans, Ugandans, and Canadians. He doesn't complain. It's his attitude that this country should emulate. Perhaps that's why he's lived so long in a country that's been at war since a sixty-seven year old man was fifteen.

formatting is still off. you also missed a presidenti (president in p6) and write priums for Primus (paragraph starting "Ndakunda Primus...").

otherwise, i really like the story. a few things to consider if you're planning on revising it:

1) i think there is a little more telling than showing about the perceived differences between interviewer and guard--does the interviewer worry about being identified with the colonialists from whom he is descended? how might a reader see that in the gesture of sharing a beer? by way of example, you do this really well when the interviewer remarks that he likes beer--knowing their lives and their experiences are so vastly different, even as they sit together, he remarks on the most common thing before them. the narrator might as well say he likes breathing or water or women. if you can replicate those kinds of situations to demonstrate the implicit social and economic differences between them, you'd really beef up the narrative power of the story. other things to consider in this regard are is it a faux pas not to offer a cigarette? should the reader make something of the fact that he identifies the house-boy by title and not by name?

2) i think the doubts/ambiguity about participation are perhaps a little over-emphasized and not really resolved in the last paragraph. i think this is a situation of less is more--if the interviewer questions whether or not his house-boy murdered people in their sleep but would rather not face the possibility, i would recommend leaving the doubt at one sentence as he records oya oya and to end the story with an ambiguous portrait of the guard as he retires into the night.

3) i think overall you might want to reduce the presence of the narrator in the story. while he is crucial as the narrative vehicle by which we understand the house-boy, he is perhaps too central to it. my guess is at the end of the story, we should be wondering about how a person might be a gentle elder that is hardworking and also have been a participant in bloody massacres. if that's the case, you need to focus on effacing the presence of the reporter and replacing it with details of the old man. right now the story is tipping into the trap of being about a Westerner who interviewed an African, rather than about the African himself.

otherwise this is a really great story. very much a relief not to read about robots or swords or the end of the world.

Hey man, thanks for taking the time to post a response! I wasn't really expecting that! I hope there are many more people in this subreddit that are as helpful.

I do like your criticisms! I don't know if I'll re-write it however, but they are good things to keep in mind in the future. A little response to some of what you said:

You're totally correct about the first point. I have a problem with achieving a balance between dialogue and description. I need to work on that, and specifically an pulling out things that will highlight tension or emotion. As for the house-boy not being mentioned by name... he's a real person, so I left it out.

Good call on that doubt. The end is rather... overdone.

I don't know about your third point though... I was going for a kind of Hunter S. Thompson Gonzo feel... maybe I didn't go about it well. Just a thing I was trying out. So, yeah.

no worries man, happy to try and help. i haven't read much Thompson but i feel a lot of what he was going for had to do with alienation and the disingenuous affectations of power/normality which i'm not sure fit with the empathetic nature of the story. if the narrator were interviewing a strongman in his luxurious palace while he spoke about the poverty of the common people and rapaciousness of the West, it would fit, but here i'm not so sure. as for the house-boy's name... you could always give him a different one unless you're trying to emphasize the separateness of their worlds. i, personally, like him nameless, but either way would work.